Open Access Explored! A conversation with Jorge Cham of PhD Comics, live from UC San Francisco

2012 was a milestone year in the transition of Open Access into a mainstream issue, within both academia and the public at large. Conversations about the future of academic publishing filled pages from the Economist to the New York Times and even reached YouTube, where PhD Comics’ video, “Open Access Explained!” saw over 100,000 views in its first few weeks.

“Open Access Explained!” has been shared thousands of times and sparked countless conversations as an introduction to the issue; however, it is just a starting point.

Join us online or in person on Thursday, January 17th at 12:00pm PST (3:00pm EST) at the University of California, San Francisco’s Pottruck Auditorium for a conversation with Jorge Cham, the animator behind PhD Comics. Jorge, who started PhD Comics while completing his PhD at Stanford, will discuss his evolving view of Open Access, how it changed while making “Open Access Explained!”, and explore lingering questions with Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, and Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at UC Davis and chair of the PLOS Biology Advisory Board.

Jorge Cham is the animator behind PhD Comics. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and was a full-time Instructor and researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 2003-2005. "Piled Higher and Deeper" the comic strip has appeared in The Stanford Daily, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and Caltech newspapers among over 50 others. The strip has appeared or been featured in the journal Nature, Science Magazine the Chronicle of Higher Education, IEEE Potentials magazine, Math Horizons magazine, Stanford Magazine and Canada's The Peer Review magazine among others, and has been linked to by USA Today's, The NY Times and The Washington Post's websites.

Heather Joseph serves as the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international coalition of over 800 libraries working to enable a more open system of scholarly communication. As SPARC’s Director, she has focused on supporting the development of new publishing strategies and business models, and advocating for national and international policies that encourage the adoption of Open Access as a central principle of research and scholarship. Prior to joining SPARC, she spent 15 years as a publishing executive in both commercial and not-for-profit publishing organizations.

Jonathan A. Eisen was born in Brookline, MA and grew up in Bethesda, MD. He went to Harvard College where he majored in Biology and then attended graduate school at Stanford University and earned a PhD in Biological Sciences. He was on the faculty at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) for eight years before moving to the University of California, Davis. At UC Davis he is a Professor with appointments in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology and the UC Davis Genome Center. He is the author of over 200 scientific publications, a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, is actively involved in the movement for increased openness in science, and serves as chair of the PLOS Biology Advisory Board.